Behind the Scenes Look : The Making of Promotions

One of the great things about working in the marketing department for a gaming studio is coming up with new ways to promote really awesome items that our creative teams have brought to life! Not a lot of people can say that they brainstorm sales centered on panther mounts, piggles, and swashbuckling companions in Pirate crews. While one may think it is all fun and games around here, there is actually a lot of time and effort spent to come up with marketing promotions for our players.

We take a few things into consideration when creating promotions including player feedback, sales data, and past performance.

Player feedback is one of the most important things we take into account when coming up with promotional ideas and reviewing past promotions. We read up on our forums, fan sites, and other locations to get a sense of what our players want, like, and dislike in game. Once we collect that feedback we brainstorm what types of promotions our players would enjoy most. This goes hand in hand with reviewing past performance of a promotion like one of our Paloozas. We see what players liked about it, what they didn’t like about it, and what they wished would have happened. We then take that feedback into account for future promotions.

Another important aspect that we consider is current sales for particular items. For example with Pet-a-Palooza in Wizard101, we look at what pets are most popular and least popular in sales volume and try to figure out why. Is it the price? Is it the look of the pet or its pedigree? Does this pet have a spell card or not? From there we assign different discounts based on our analysis which hopefully will get our players excited and want to collect more pets. We also like to include other items that help out pets and not just pets themselves!

Once we have decided on the promotion and discounts, we need to come up with a promotion name. Naming promotions are fun and can be silly at times, but we definitely try to make sure they are not cheesy! For example the Bag O’ Gold Sale in Pirate101 is a play on Pot O’ Gold during the St. Patrick’s holiday and is more fun than calling it a Gold Sale.

Along with a promotion name, we also need a page created to help promote the sale and give our players more information about what’s cool and new that is going on. We make sure that the screenshots or renders help support the sale and show off some of the great items that you can get. On the day of the sale, we make sure that the promotion is correct in the Crown Shop and everything is good to go!

After the promotion has ended, we look at player feedback to see what they liked, didn’t like, or if they were interested in it at all. Then we look at the sales performance to see if it’s worth running the promotion again or if we should come up with something new.

Hopefully this shed some light behind the scenes on how we come up with promotions here at KingsIsle! Keep posting and letting us know what you think of promotions we run and what else you would like to see going forward! We’ve always got our eye out looking for feedback.

120 Comments

i love this game i spend so much money and time in it. But i wish when I pvp not to get matched against a level 3 with third ty resist like come on i cant hurt them i like the game it was back when it began nothing was over powered everything was balanced … sorry my writing is bad

I love Wizard 101 and all the great things you do for the players. My biggest wish would be to take some of the “junk” out of the packs. It is so frustrating to spend hard earned crowns on a pack, just to get a bunch of useless housing items or endless cheap pet snacks. Players buy packs to get gear, pets and mounts. Please put more of those items in the packs and lighten up on the junk! Thanks!

the 50% off bundles was good I o most got like 4 bundles for good gear for all my characters and a 4 month membership it also nice how we can team up in dungeons and when we teleport to safe area it marks that spot that we teleported from. Awesome wizard101!

I was thinking Kingsisle Blog, you guys should make two new mounts! One that is fox and the other is a panda. Here is the offer. Everyone that has a wizard 101 and a Pirate 101 account can have both of these for 10,000 in gold. I will be unlimited times that will last up to a week or two. Like I said before so that everyone can get one. When the week or two weeks are done, they will be gone. And they will come next year as well. What do you think people on this blog?! Sounds good! 😀

To be honest I like all the promotions, considering that when a promotion ends another is sure to be on it’s way. I really loved the 50% bundle only because on that day I was planning on buying one bundle and got twice as much as I wanted, one for each game, Thanks KingsIsle!

I liked the Pack-A-Palooza promotion because you were able to get a free pack! I don’t have any crowns, so it was worth it.

I haven’t come up with a title yet, but if you can, can there be a promotion where you get a free pet from the crown shop or whatnot for KinsIsle’s or Wizard101’s birthday? It would be a nice gift from KingsIsle!

Thanks for taking this into consideration! I LOVE Wizard101 and I never want this game to end 😀

I like each pirate101 and wizard101. My favorite quest about wizard101 is defeating the lost souls and i was scared at once. it was like i was defeating invisible coats.My pappy got membership on pirate101 but not on wizard101 so i cant go to any worlds like mooshu or marlybone or draganspyre all i can do is stay at wizard city and defeat lost souls and dark fairies and skeleton pirate and the krakan.

You know, Pirate101 needs some new packs. Tired of opening the crown shop every day and seeing the same thing. And what about the “huge” update? It better be two worlds cause I reserved a special two months membership for it.

i also loved the pack a palooza and stuff cause i dont have any crowns and i am on grizzlehiem but i cant get north guard cause its life five dollars so its really expensive. i mean come on two thousands crowns seriously and i dont wanna get memmbership because after that time you lose everyplace you had